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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Honestly I think tariffs could be a good thing if used in certain ways, but certainly not in the manner that the orange idiot has been applying them. They act to make targeted products more expensive, so if one was to specifically tariff goods made under labor conditions that would be illegally substandard in this country, such as under safety conditions that wouldn't meet our regulations or with purchasing power adjusted wages that would be below our minimum, and set the tariff amount so as to make those goods just a bit more expensive than if they had been made under conditions that at least met our standards, you could reduce the economic incentive for companies to outsource to places where they can exploit their workforce more, and reduce the incentive for those places to avoid improving their labor laws. Trump would never use them for something like that though.
Agreed, but I would use tariffs as a form of carbon tax on countries w/o sufficient climate policies. Individual companies/products could reduce the tariff by proving how much pollution is actually produced.
I suppose you could extend that to other negative externalities we want to control for as well.
Great use for them. If the reason it's cheaper is that they aren't paying the externalities, then adding a tariff is a great way to compensate for that.
Or tariffs on countries with terrible labour policies. It's always annoyed me that labour is never involved in free trade negotiations and the stuff that makes it in are requirements for standardisation or intellectual property, but never anything about labour standards.
Of course, that's by design, because all of those things are neoliberal constructs and the whole point of those is to break labour power, but it's disappointing you never even see anyone pay lip service to anything like that.
Did you not read the first comment in this thread? It talks about just this.
I thought I was adding to the conversation by mentioning free trade agreements, but ok.